The death of a temporary employee at an Amazon.com facility has drawn attention to the temporary work force, an increasingly popular way for big corporations to boost profits and CEO pay packages by providing lower wages and eliminating benefits.
(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

We may not know for several months exactly how a temporary worker died this month at Amazon.com’s distribution center in Avenel, but there is already a lot we know about how companies like Amazon exploit temps and too often fail to protect them from physical danger.

Ronald Smith, a father of four and grandfather of seven, was killed when he was crushed by equipment in the Avenel center. Like tens of thousands of other temp workers, he was helping Amazon bring in more than $60 billion a year in revenue — creating so much wealth that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was able to buy the Washington Post and related businesses this year for $250 million.

The use of temporary workers has become increasingly popular with big corporations in recent years as a way to boost profits and CEO pay packages by providing lower wages and eliminating benefits. Large corporations often use contractors and temp agencies and then pretend they have no responsibility for the poor conditions workers face.

Earlier this year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced a new initiative to focus attention on corporations’ responsibility to protect temporary workers’ health and safety. The agency pointed out that an alarming number of temporary workers are killed in the first few weeks on the job. Twelve percent of workplace fatal injuries involve contractors, OSHA said, and of those, 28 percent were Latino.

As OSHA’s director, David Michaels, noted, temporary workers "often perform the most dangerous jobs, have limited English proficiency and are not receiving the training and protective measures required. Workers must be safe, whether they’ve been on the job for one day or for 25 years."
A study released this month by ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit center for investigative journalism, found that the incidence of temporary worker injuries over the past five years was between 36 percent and 72 percent higher than for regular workers, based on workers’ compensation records in five states in different regions of the country. Temporary workers were 68 percent more likely than nontemporary workers to be working in the 20 percent of occupations with the highest injury rate.

OSHA should be commended for calling attention to this urgent issue and for urging host corporations and temp agencies to meet their legal responsibility to provide safe conditions and proper training. But, unfortunately, lobbyists for big corporations often succeed at preventing Congress from providing the safety agency with the necessary resources to make employers obey the law.

At the same time, corporate special interests have been able to severely weaken enforcement of workers’ legal right to form unions in order to insist on safe conditions.

There is no way to restore Ronald Smith’s life. But in this holiday season, consumers can let public officials and companies such as Amazon know that we don’t believe that deaths, injuries and work-related illnesses ought to be part of the package as we send and receive our gifts.
Marien Casillas Pabellon is executive director of New Labor, an immigrant worker organization in New Jersey. John Pajak is president of the N.J. Work Environment Council, a coalition of more than 70 labor, environmental, and community groups. Keep the conversation going at njvoices.com.